A conversation about inventors killed by their inventions
Whether you're in history buff, a daredevil or just have a touch of schadenfreude, join us as we discuss inventors who were the architects of their own demise and scientists who still impact us today.
There’s the phrase “necessity is the mother of invention” but sometimes it seems like it’s just a heaping dose of curiosity … and you know what they say about curiosity.
In this conversation, we chat about inventors who maybe didn’t think their ideas through quite enough then wander into scientists experimenting on the nearest subject at hand — themselves.
J - This is the big fictional one that comes to mind: Solomon Epstein from The Expanse series - he invented the modified Fusion Drive used in the series.
I remember rooting for him when I first saw it, hoping he’d find a way to stop his ship—but, spoiler alert, nope.
C - That brings to mind one of the biggest categories in real life—people trying to fly. Tales go back all the way to Daedalus and Icarus (maybe even earlier). But where would we be without people trying? Though some of them were just overconfident in their invention or … we’re not supposed to use the word stupid. Like Franz Reichelt (1912).
That’s one story that always stands out when I hear about it—he felt the reason his parachute coat never worked was because he wasn’t jumping from high. Nope, that wasn’t the problem.
J - That’s terrible.
C - All the more terrible because of the crowd gathered to watch.
J - Deep sea diving suffered from similar lapses in knowledge/logic.
C - Lapses in judgement as well.
J - Like John Day who in 1774 built a wooden diving chamber. He bet the captain of the ship taking his chamber to sea that it could stay down for 12 hours. He exceeded his expectations as it stayed down forever—with John inside. I think his error was bad math though.
C - In some ways, that echoes Franz—though in Day’s case, the first attempt worked, so let’s go way deeper without really thinking it through.
J - And then there are those who practised experimental medicine on themselves.
C - Like Alexander Bogdanov? He was a pioneer in blood transfusion, though he tested the process on himself.
His story is a bit tragic—he was caught up in the shifting sands of early Soviet politics.
On the flip side, there were so many people who, without their experiments, we wouldn’t have fundamental medical practices—like blood transfusions, anaesthesia or x-rays
J - The chemist Humphrey Davy put a lot of effort testing out gases to potentially be anaesthesia—he even threw parties for the testing, so for fun and science! (note, he lived).
Davy is pictured above holding the bellows as part of a lecture on pneumatics. In all my years of schooling, I’ve never attended a lecture quite that explosive.
C - The parties included Samuel Taylor Coolridge … anaesthesia wasn’t the only substance he experimented with. His poem Kublai Khan was apparently the result of an opium dream.
J - On a more macabre note, Nicolae Minovici (1868-1941) did research in the the effects of hanging on the human body and he used himself as a test subject (he lived).
C - Why? I don’t understand why.
J - On the topic of the unexplainable, there’s the Darwin awards. It isn’t specifically for inventors, but some of them are. And clearly there are issues with knowledge, logic and judgement.
C - I don’t know if any of them were Darwin award winners, but maybe should have been—all the people who tried to invent new ways to survive going over Niagara Falls. Just, why?
Though the flying car might also fall into this category: let’s just strap a Cessna’s wings to a Ford Pinto—what could go wrong?
J - There’s even a recent daredevil who’s daredevilry went wrong—while climbing it as a stunt, he fell off a 68 story building in Hong Kong. As someone not keen on heights, I have to wonder what he was thinking?
C - I’m glad I’m not a daredevil.
J - Yeah, hard no on daredevilry.
C - It’d be fun to write though.
J - I’m good with my fictional characters doing things that might land them a Darwin Award—makes things interesting and entertaining (I’ve been very entertained by researching these people).
C - After doing some research and seeing the lists of people, I did a specific search for women inventors who died from their inventions—and there was only one I could find, Marie Curie. Which was less an invention than a discovery. And it was just a lack of knowledge about radiation.
J - And because of her we now have that knowledge.
C - I imagine most of us, at least is this neck of the woods, have had an x-ray at some point in our lives.
J - Speaking of the woods, there’s the ad for people willing to be human bait for a project to find Bigfoot. It’s a few years old, but maybe they still need people—just remember ‘safety not guaranteed’.
C - That page is brilliant! Maybe that’s the tagline for inventors who experiment at the edges of our knowledge—safety not guaranteed. Though it some cases, a little more use of logic and a little less hubris might have led to a better outcome.
What about you? Are there any stories of inventors killed by their inventions that stand out to you? Or favourite scientists whose discoveries led to wonderful things?